An identified opportunity to improve the construct of innovation in quality applications: A state-of-the-art-matrix (SAM) study

Some organizations have been able to accomplish innovation sporadically while others have a consistent pattern of success. In fact, innovation is widely recommended to be part of regular operations for most organizations. However, including the construct of innovation in quality applications has been elusive; this deficiency, when addressed, has been attempted to relate quality management with innovation or criticize the difficulties that quality management faces when including innovation. Some studies go beyond that and state that quality management is a limitation by itself for innovation. In this paper, an in-depth systematic literature review, using the State-of-the-Art-Matrix (SAM) methodology, is performed to elucidate an opportunity area for a solution to this problem. This literature review provides an analysis aiming to understand the reason for poor innovation development as a construct in the field of quality. Innovation is identified as a missing element in the cost of poor quality theoretical framework (COPQ) also known as quality cost and cost of quality (COQ), requiring a future research. Identifying and delimiting this research problem provides a better comprehension of quality and its costs to assist industrial engineers and managers to explore, analyze and design new quality management programs by including this construct with more confidence.